This invention relates to a device used in the manufacturing of rolls of flat steel strips, and more particularly for breaking such rolls off from a coil of sheet metal which has been partially slit.
Recent advances in the manufacturer of narrow sheets of flat steel have led to the development of devices which can be used to fabricate such sheets of steel very economically. One such device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,155,238 granted on May 22, 1979 to J. W. Rogers. A wide metal sheet rolled up in a cylindrical shape is fed into the Rogers device which has a plurality of cutting wheels which slit the sheet to form a weakened area between a number of narrower strips. The strips are coiled up on a rewind drum. The slitting is only partially completed leaving interconnecting tabs or other interconnecting portions between the adjacent strips. Thus, the rewind drum contains a construct of several strips of sheet metal all coiled up and interconnected by tabs. Before the strips can be used, they must be separated from the construct.
Although the Rogers' slitting mechanism itself proved to be very efficient there is a need for a device which can perform the operation of breaking apart the construct as soon as the slitting process is complete, in a fast and economical way. Other devices have been proposed but none of them proved to be efficient enough for a modern manufacturing operation. (See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,191,318, 4,176,774 and 4,195,759).